DAVID MARTIN was a teacher for eighteen years. He began in special education and then went from fourth grade to
seventh-grade language arts. But it was his work as a first-grade Reading
Recovery teacher that helped him understand the needs of “brand-new
readers.”

Now retired
from teaching, David works as an early reading support specialist for the
Vermont Department of Education. He has written numerous books for
children, including Five Little Piggies, illustrated by Susan
Meddaugh and winner of a Parents’ Choice Award, and Little Chicken
Chicken
,
illustrated by Sue Heap. As much as he loves those books, he says the most
important book he’s written is a crudely illustrated, handmade book called POP.
“I made this book for the young readers I was teaching and, for many children,
POP was the very first book they really read. And they read it again and again.
After a while, I had to photocopy the book because so many kids wanted their
own. They liked POP because they could proudly read it themselves and because at
the end they got to “pop” the pictures of the balloons with their reading
fingers. The more they read it, the more enthusiastically they popped the
balloons, and the more they laughed.”

With POP, David learned how to
combine his knowledge about the kinds of books children who are just learning to
read need with what he knows about writing stories that children like -- stories
with good characters and good mischief. Now POP has been recast, featuring
Monkey as its main character. “Monkey gets to pop the balloons,” he says, “while
in other stories, he eats worms (just kidding), flies away with a kite, and
makes birthday presents for his mom that only a mom could love. He is,” says
David, “a bit like me.”

LEDA SCHUBERT holds degrees from Harvard
University and Brandeis University and has been a school library media
consultant at the Vermont Department of Education since 1987. She is a member of
Vermont’s early literacy team, which is currently developing a plan to ensure
that all children can read by the end of grade three. “As part of that work,”
she says, “I've become quite familiar with the materials that exist to teach
reading, and with the complex agenda that exists around the teaching of reading.
I think what sets Brand New Readers apart is that they combine the best of the
commercial publishing approach to easy readers with the best of the series that
are published for school markets.”

Leda Schubert is also a charter member
of the committee that organizes Vermont’s children’s choice picture book award,
the Red Clover Award, and served on the 1999 Caldecott committee. She has taught
graduate-level courses in children's literature for St. Michael’s College and
the University of Vermont, and worked as a school librarian and English teacher
for many years. Fueled by a long-term commitment to making every child a reader
-- and her lifelong involvement with and love of children’s books -- Leda
Schubert wrote the Winnie books with her own dog in mind. “Winnie is a nut case
and runs our lives. She is funny, demanding, and delightful, and talks and
argues with us about everything. I thought kids would like a book about a dog
who, though clearly a dog, is also very childlike. There’s a lot of love in
these stories, and I think illustrator Bill Benedict captured that
perfectly.”

AMY EHRLICH is
a children’s book editor and the author of more than thirty books for
children, including picture books, easy-to-reads, fairy tale retellings,
and young adult novels. She has worked in children's book publishing since
the mid-1960s and was the founding editor of Candlewick Press. “From the
time we started Candlewick in Spring 1991,” she says, “I wanted to
establish a series of easy readers. I’d written three myself, Leo,
Zack, and Emmie and Leo, Zack, and Emmie Together Again,
about three friends in first grade; and Buck Buck the Chicken
, about a pet chicken who moves
in with a family. But I felt that books in this genre needed to be reinvigorated
-- made fresh and beautiful again, the way the Harper I Can Reads seemed when
they were first published in the 1950s.

“I was also aware of the Reading
Recovery books that were being used in the early grades and had seen
kindergarten children in my local elementary school library read them
enthusiastically, with help only from library aides and older students. It
seemed clear to me that these children were having a very positive first reading
experience. The trouble was that there were no similiar books available in
bookstores to help children crack the reading code at home with their parents.
Many people participated in making the first Brand New Readers a reality, but I
would especially like to thank the designer of the series, Amelia Edwards, who
saw almost immediately what these books needed to look like and how they needed
to work.”

Amy Ehrlich has now become a Brand New Reader author herself.
Her two sets of Brand New Readers about Kazam, a girl magician, will be
published in Fall 2001.